To expand the canon and add to the topic of organizational culture and diversity, I chose an article written by Dr. Ronit Molko called “The Benefits of Neurodiversity in the Work Place.” This article addresses neurodiversity within the work place. First, the article addresses how individuals with neurological disorders such as autism, ADHD, and dyslexia are under represented in the work place. Following that, Dr. Ronit Molko, makes the argument that hiring more individuals who suffer from neurological disorders would actually significantly benefit an organization and it’s goals. Using the example of people who are autistic, one could easily fixate on the set backs that having multiple people who are autistic in a company could bring. However, if one could shift their perspective, he or she would realize that people who suffer from autism possess many qualities that are strengths and could potentially benefit a company significantly. Molko adds value for a broad audience of anyone in the work place, but especially those who are in higher up positions, that would be able to make decisions on hiring. He does this by explaining both the strengths and weaknesses of those with autism, and how they can benefit a company. This article is coming from a website called “Forbes Books.” This website is operated and owned by the well known publisher, Forbes. The intended audience of this article is anyone in business, but especially those with hiring privileges. The purpose of this article is to educated individuals in the work place about how individuals with neurological disorders could benefit a company significantly. This is done by Dr. Ronit Molko, by explains who people with neurological issues are under represented and then explaining how big companies are starting to take advantage of people with autism for example, that have advanced skills in some areas. In conclusion, this article supports people with neurological disorders, a group of individuals who are under represented, and their voices are hardly heard. In this course, we have been analyzing the topic of minorities within the workplace. This issue is less of a problem today, because action has been taken, in the form of laws being passed, that require a certain number of minorities to be employed at a company. Minorities voices on the topic of under representation in the work place have been heard, but much more work should be done and could be done\. People who suffer from neurological disorders are similar to people of minorities, because they both have been under represented in the work place. Yet, people with neurological disorders have yet to be heard for the most part. To support my argument and the purpose of the article I have chosen, I am including media. I have chosen a video by the company HSBC. The video is connected to my claims, because it interviews people who suffer form neurological disorders that work at HSBC. The employees with neurological disorders come off to be very bright, and they prove their brilliance, and make it clear that they can benefit a company.
Expanding the Canon, Summary, Benjamin Fisch
In his article, “Dr. Ronit Molko,” explains how individuals with neurological issues, such as autism, should be more represented in the workplace, because of fairness, and because individuals with autism for example could greatly benefit companies. Molko touches on how big corporations such as SAP, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Ford, and IBM are starting to tap into the benefits of hiring employees with neurological disorders such as Autism. He notes that small business should also do the same. Hiring individuals with autism is not only fair, but it will also benefit the overall objective of the company. Individuals with autism, for example, have an ability to hyper focus on a topic or a task. This makes them valuable in the work space. What company would be opposed to hiring an employee who is able to hyper focus in on their assigned job or task? The answer should be none. That’s what ever company, small or large, dreams of, employees that are disciplined and able to hyper concentrate on their job. With all this being said, those with neurological disorders, such as autism, are perfect for the work place. Mary Ellen Smith, corporate vice-president of Microsoft, said that “people with autism bring strengths that we need at Microsoft.” This is an example of a huge step forward in the movement of having more individuals with neurological disorders in the work place.
Discussion HW week 6/1 Benjamin Fisch
For my article of choosing, I am looking for some sort of current events article. There is so much going on the world right now, so even narrowing down the subject of my article that I am looking for will be difficult. However, I feel that the topic that is the most important at this time, is the protests that have been going on throughout the major cities in our country, and what they stand for. I am looking for material that addresses the state of the peaceful protests and covers the Black Lives Matter movement. Also, I would like to find an article that identifies the difference between the peaceful protests and the looting that has been going on. The looting is discoloring the beauty of the protests, and spreading a message of fear and hate. That is not at the core of what this movement stands for. I would like to find an author or any type of source that is Black and has experienced any type of police brutality or form of discrimination. I want to hear their story, because by telling each of these stories we are educating the masses. I am using Google Search to find content, and it is working quite well. Whenever I search “Black Lives Matter” or “peaceful protests” a ton of articles come up.
Summary 6/1 K&D Benjamin Fisch
In their article, “Neurodiversity as a Competitive Advantage” Austin and Pisano explain the struggle of those who suffer from neurological conditions to get positions in the work place. They go on to explain further that the typical process of hiring in the work place, (job interview,) cuts out many individuals with neurological issues like autism from having a chance at getting hired. This is important, because firstly it is unfair, and secondly individuals with autism for example may have extraordinary skills that would greatly benefit the intentions of a business. The issue is that those with neurological conditions are under represented in the work place. However, their is a solution to this and notable companies are starting to take action towards it. “A growing number of companies’ HR practices are capitalizing on the talents of neurodiverse people. In the process, they are becoming better able to fully leverage the skills of all workers.”
Prompt Discussion/Responses
Prompt 1) The standard way of thinking about diversity policies has it that they are instrumental in stimulating minority leadership and impacting leadership self-perceptions of minority categories in organizations. However, by manipulating the environment to the degree in which they did in Gundemir et al’s argument, I was left wondering what would happen if they spent time in actual environments, those known to have undergone diversion policy integration, to see how it’s operating without any manipulations. This was such a scientific experiment, it seemed to lack an experiential human component of observation and witness. In tern eliminating a sense of the call and response of human interaction that takes place on a daily basis in the workplace.
Prompt 2) While many might automatically assume that any efforts to expand on and progress any type of diversity in the workplace, whether we are looking at how diversity is framed, or the opportunities and challenges diversity brings to a workplace; they are efforts generally determined as good works automatically. Gundemir et al make very thorough attempts to show factual data of the findings of their research, and Austin and Pisano speak very freely about the current low standard deviation of neurodiversity in our society. They both implicate clearly why and what the challenges are in changing certain low standard deviations when it comes to diversity in the workplace. I wonder though, by just bringing these things to attention, is there actual impact from this that is scalable? Not in the diversity itself, but the research being done about diversity.
Unit 1 Response Questions
- From the reading entitled “Why Diversity Matters” many questions surrounding diversity arise for me. The first one being why do gender and ethnically diverse companies produce better results financially. Because of this, how do we further diverse companies so that most companies are outperforming and doing better financially than they did in the past. Although this is a hard task to do, it can be done over time. According to the article, for every 10% in recital and ethnic diversity, the company sees a 0.8 in earning before taxes and interest. This number should catch the eye of a lot of companies and as a result, hopefully diversify not only the workers, but leadership as well. In the other reading talking about culture, I noticed that using the quotes of various people, culture plays a huge role in our everyday lives. Katanga’s quote stood out to me which read “culture is how organizations do things.” I thought this was interesting because there are a bunch of different cultures in companies so I was wondering how do organizations go about this.
- In the article “Why Diversity Matters” there were a lot of intriguing quotes. The one I would like to talk about is “Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.” This statistic raises a bunch of questions for me. One being why don’t more companies diversify their organizations if the numbers show drastic improvements? In addition, what do people outside of these companies think? all these statistics show that with less diversity, it is harder to succeed and the same amount of financial returns. In a lot of companies, you need people of many different backgrounds and cultures to connect to all the customers which is why these diverse companies show such an improvement. Although it may be difficult and take more time, these statics show that is is well worth it and companies should be changing their hiring.
Benjamin Fisch, 5/18 week responses
These readings make me wonder about a few issues. The reading suggests that “culture is powerfully shaped by incentives.” After reading this, this reminded me of capitalism, and the issue that the system of intense capitalism can sometimes lead to greed and abuse of power. This raised the issue for me that a culture of incentives can lead to a culture in an organization of greed. A culture of a greed is an issue to a business for example, because this culture will promote individuals under the organization to work towards their own selfish goals rather than work towards the agenda of the organization. I would be interested in exploring further the question of deciding whether or not the culture of incentive is the best option that an organization has. Although, capitalism and working towards and incentive is flawed its the system that we use, because we decided the capitalism is better than socialism or communism. I would be interested in exploring whether a culture of incentives or capitalism is better than a culture of socialism.
2. When reading “culture is consistent, observable patterns of behavior in organizations,” I am reminded of many of my own personal connections that relate. Aristotle said, “we are what we repeatedly do.” The first connection that comes to my mind is the mentality of my high school basketball team. We had a strong culture, and that was a culture of winning. We very rarely lost a game, and a lot of this stemmed from the mentality that we had of never giving up and our culture of winning. Another connection that I made after reading was that my family has its own culture as well. My family is small, but it can still serve as an organization. My family had a culture of togetherness and love. If one of us was having an issue, then we were all having an issue. On the other hand, if one of us was thriving we were all thriving. My family exhibits consistent, observable patterns of organization, which defines it as a culture.
Overview of Week of 5/25
Now that we’ve gotten to know each other a bit and have gotten our feet wet, so to speak, in what organizational culture and diversity are, we’re going to spend this week deepening our knowledge of those topics AND beginning to think about some writerly concerns.
In this post, I’ll lay out a little more info about the week’s assignments and point you toward some additional resources that will help you to complete those tasks. Please read on for more.
Reading assignments:
- “The impact of organizational diversity policies on minority employees’ leadership self-perceptions and goals” by Gundemir et al (you will use SUMMON on the library website to locate and download this article)
- “Neurodiversity as a competitive advantage” by Austin & Pisano (on Blackboard)
- chapter 1 “They Say” of They Say/I Say
Writing/discussion assignments:
- 100-200 word summary of Gundemir et al (working with the guidance from the handout on summary, on Bb and in the blog post linked below) [due Weds., 5/27 through Bb]
- 200-300 word comparison of Gundemir and Austin & Pisano article, focusing on how the pieces differ in author, audience, purpose, and approach [due Sunday, 5/31 through Bb]
- discussion posts in response to this week’s prompts [due Saturday, 5/30]
Check out these additional resources:
- read over the Close Reading handout on Blackboard (click on the Handouts tab there)
- read through this blog post (and check out the embedded links) for some more background on genre and summary
Intro, Benjamin Fisch
Hi everyone! My name is Benjamin Fisch and I am a Junior at Syracuse University. I am required to take this course for my major, but I am still very excited to be enrolled in it. Throughout the course of this class, I can see myself growing and getting better as a writer. This is very exciting for me. My major at Syracuse is Liberal Studies. I am very fond of Syracuse and my experiences with the University thus far. However, I did not start my college career here. I began college at Indiana University and spent 3 years there. For health and personal reasons I transferred to Syracuse and I have not looked back.
I consider myself to be a very caring and compassionate person. My favorite sports to watch are football and basketball. My favorite football team is the Minnesota Vikings and my favorite NBA team is the Los Angeles Lakers, because of Lebron James. I follow whatever team Lebron is on, because I am a huge fan of his. I also love music. I can connect with all different genres of music, but specifically hip hop is my main interest. Although, I am not very fond of the new hip hop that is coming out of the industry today. I gravitate towards hip hop of the 90s and early 2,000s era.
Intro
Hi! My name is Samantha Danylchuk and I’m a rising Sophomore at SU with a dual major in Entrepreneurship & Engaging Enterprises in Whitman and Advertising in Newhouse. I’m taking this class to get ahead on credits so my next few semesters won’t be too heavy with coursework, but also because it is required for my major. However, I’m really excited!!! I really love reading and writing blogs in general so this new format seems so fun and a different take on any other class I’ve ever had. I’m from Northern NJ and love the Yankees 🙂
This summer my plans are TBD due to coronavirus, but I am working at a little shop in my town. I have taken a few online courses so far and they seemed to run smoothly for me because I made sure I wrote down all my deadlines! It’s definitely weird not being able to communicate with my professor and classmates in person but also asking any questions via email if I need more clarification / feedback on an assignment helps me succeed too